Brianne and Josh Debiak embrace upon his return to Camp Pendleton from training in Twentynine Palms. Their son Maddox Debiak, 3, is in the background. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Maddox Debiak walks past a display of his and his sister Kaylee's art work at the Debiak home in Camp Pendleton. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Brianne Debiak leads her two children, Maddox, 3, and Kaylee, 6, through a pillow fight in their Camp Pendleton home. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Kaylee and Maddox Debiak play in Kaylee's room. Their mother, Brianne Debiak, says she worries when she doesn't hear them. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Brianne Debiak and her two children, Kaylee, 6, and Maddox, 3, play in Kaylee's bedroom in their Camp Pendleton home. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Brianne Debiak chats and has a cup of coffee in her Camp Pendleton home. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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A test of will develops between Brianne Debiak and her daughter Kaylee. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Maddox Debiak, 3, smiles as his mother tries to fix a broken toy. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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A couple of superhero dolls lie on the floor at the feet of Maddox Debiak. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Maddox tries to outflank mom, Brianne Debiak, while she gets an arts project organized. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Maddox Debiak sits with a doll made with an image of his father, Marine Staff Sgt. Josh Debiak. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Brianne Debiak checks on the progress of her husband's trip back home from training in Twentynine Palms. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Marine Staff Sgt. Josh Debiak arrives home from training at Twentynine Palms and gets reacquainted with his son, Maddox. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Kaylee Debiak shows her dad, Marine Staff Sgt. Josh Debiak, how she can stick out her tongue with her jaw shut because she had lost so many teeth in his absence. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Brianne Debiak tries to discipline a very contrite Maddox Debiak. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Brianne Debiak tries to discipline a very contrite Maddox Debiak but ended up hugging him instead. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Today's recruits are tomorrow's veterans who will face an evolving society.

10 years of war: Events in the world and the Debiak family since 2001

Editor's note: We are approaching two 10-year anniversaries. Sept. 11 we all remember. But Oct. 7 we seem to have forgotten. It marks 10 years of war: first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq – longer than any time in U.S. history. More than 6,200 dead. More than 45,000 wounded. Over four Sundays, the Orange County Register will tell the story of the more than 2 million troops who've fought in these wars. As we commemorate the anniversaries of Sept. 11 and Oct. 7, let us, as a nation, seek to understand the sacrifices made as a result of them.

They were so young the first time they said goodbye, a couple of newlyweds who had never been through war. He forgot his gas mask, and she had to rush home to get it as if all he had left in the bedroom closet was a briefcase.

The second time they said goodbye, Brianne and Josh Debiak huddled around a car heater, fighting off fear and the early-morning chill with jokes and small talk. She told him she would kill him if he didn't come home safe.

The third time, they had a daughter, a whirlwind of sweet energy who gave her dad a plastic hippo to remember her by. They had a baby boy, too, who learned his first word – Dada – while Dada was on a ship.

They know there will be a fourth goodbye, another morning when Staff Sgt. Josh Debiak – a Marine's Marine with a white line zipped across his neck from an enemy bullet – boards a plane for some distant war zone. The children are old enough now to know that where he goes will most likely have sand and camels and lots of danger.

Brianne is as much a veteran as her husband. She knows what it's like to wake up that first morning alone, to sit by herself in a silent house after the kids have gone to sleep. She knows how the goodbyes go.

"You give him a big hug, and you don't want to let go," she says, "because you know as soon as you let go, that's it."

•••

Their love story began with five words, as Brianne remembers it. What's up with your pants?

They were at a bowling alley with friends, and she remembers him as a kicked-back tough guy with a haircut so high and tight that it looked more mohawk than Marine. He was, she says now, wearing the craziest rave pants she had ever seen.

He called her a few days later, to wish her a happy birthday. They went bowling again. And, a few months later, on the official birth date of the U.S. Marine Corps, they married on board a yacht called Destiny in Newport Harbor.

He had joined the Marines after high school, following his father and brothers into the military. The Marines, he says in a barrel-chested drawl, "is a tight-knit group of guys who always claim to be the best. That's what I wanted to be a part of."

She was an Orange County girl, a career nanny with sunshine in her personality. She had never thought about marrying into the armed forces, much less the Marines. She realized, as war loomed, that his job could make her a widow.

He was 21. She was 18.

•••

"It never seems real until they're gone." Brianne says during a quiet moment, with Josh gone for five weeks of training and the children hard at work on a coloring project. "Until that next day, when you wake up and they're not there and it's like, there's going to be a whole lot more mornings when you wake up and they're not there."

Josh left in the morning the first time, with that nearly forgotten gas mask in his pack and orders that said Kuwait but meant Iraq. He had deployed once before they met, a peacetime tour to Japan, but this was his first combat tour.

Brianne told him to come home safe, kissed him goodbye and then – not knowing what else to do – went to work.

She would say later that she spent most of the first two years of her marriage living by herself. Josh was part of the leading edge of the invasion of Iraq, a straight shot into Baghdad. He came home for a few months and then deployed again, this time to the deadly streets of Fallujah.

Brianne spritzed a teddy bear with his cologne the first night he was gone and slept with it on her pillow. She fought the loneliness by calling neighbors over at night for games of Scrabble. Fighting the fear was a lot harder.

She was getting ready for work one morning when she heard a name she knew well on the television. It was like a kick in the stomach. A good friend, a man who had sat at their kitchen table the night before he and Josh deployed, had been killed. "It could be mine next," she thought.

Josh came home in mid-2004, so scratched up that Brianne at first didn't notice the faint white scar on the side of his neck, cut by a bullet skipping off a rooftop. He didn't tell her until later about the time bullets slammed into a wall so close to his head that he was sprayed with rubble.

They went to visit his family in Pennsylvania after he got back. They were driving on the evening of July 4 when fireworks exploded overhead. He jumped, let go of the wheel, and reached for a weapon that wasn't there.

•••

"Daddy! Daddy!" Six-year-old Kaylee stands on a kitchen chair, arms outstretched. Josh grabs her by the waist, swings her into the air, turns her around and deposits her, giggling, onto the couch. He jokes that the sneak attacks don't end when he comes home.

"These ones involve two knees in your torso area," he says. "Out in Afghanistan, you feel like you're a little more prepared for it."

They were born in the years between his deployments: Kaylee, a sprite of a girl, equal parts sweet and sassy; and then Maddox, quieter than his big sister but no less active.

Maddox was still a newborn baby when Josh boarded a ship in San Diego for his third deployment, a six-month tour at sea. Kaylee told friends that her dad was working with the fishies.

For Brianne, it was the life of a single parent – managing the household finances, running the errands and keeping the kids entertained with coloring projects and kitchen-table crafts. Mom became the disciplinarian; dad became the fun guy who would come home soon to roughhouse and watch cartoons with them.

The kids found stuffed dolls in their stockings that Christmas – "Daddy Dolls" with Josh's face copied onto the cloth. They sent him videos, with Kaylee dancing and making faces at the camera, and Maddox repeating his first word, "Dada."

Kaylee had slipped a toy hippo and a dragonfly hairclip into Josh's bag before he left, and he kept them on a shelf next to his bunk. At night, Kaylee and her mother would blow goodnight kisses out to sea for him.

•••

"Are they going to look back and go, 'Wow, other kids got to do all this with their daddy, and we didn't get to?' " Brianne watches as Kaylee and Maddox decorate foam animals with stickers. "To them, it can be so normal. I think they're just like, 'Oh, it's another thing that daddy missed.' "

The calendar on the kitchen wall has a big heart with a sad face marking the day when Josh expects to leave again, this time for Afghanistan. Brianne starts listing all the special days he will miss: Christmas. Maddox's birthday. The first day of school.

Maddox looks up from his foam animal: "Everything!"

He's 3 years old now, still too young to entirely understand what his dad does. He knows, though, that Afghanistan is a "huge place that goes all the way up to the sky, far away." Kaylee, now 6, understands much more. She's watched National Geographic videos that show the Marines in Afghanistan, and confided in her mom that she's scared.

The word comes down a few days later – just a week before that sad-hearted day on the calendar. After Josh has spent five weeks training in the California desert, and Kaylee has picked out a toy jaguar to send with him to Afghanistan, his deployment is called off.

"Daddy's going to be here for Maddox's birthday!" Kaylee shouts when they tell her.

But it's not that easy for Brianne and Josh. It's been a full-throttled run-up to nothing, another nick for a veteran family in wartime.

"At least we get a little more time," Brianne says. But she knows that it's still out there, maybe far away and maybe close. That next goodbye.

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